As a pinyin (the official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese characters into Latin alphabet), "wang" is the Mandarin pronunciation of a number of Chinese characters, including 王 and 网.

"王" is the surname of more than 100 million Chinese around the world but it also means "king" or "best of its kind". "网" means "web" or "net". For example, one of the largest Chinese online retail platforms, "taobao.com" is known as 淘宝网 (pronounced "taobao-wang"). Many other household brands, social media or retail platforms hosted on a .com or .cn site are pronounced and known to Chinese users and consumers as "brand-wang", explains Eugene Li, CEO of Zodiac.

Li and his team are based in Beijing, China. "At Zodiac, our strengths lie with our people and our local knowledge and expertise. Being close to the market and the fact we speak the same language as our customers will hopefully set us apart from some of the new entrants. ", adds Li. Before joining Zodiac, Li was a senior executive at CNNIC where he was instrumental in driving the rapid growth of .cn, which reached 10 million registrations in 2008.

"After four long years of preparation and ICANN processes, we are very excited to be able to finally offer a Chinese style domain name space. In China, .cn and .com have around 10 and 6 million registrations, respectively. Our goal is to make .wang one of the most successful new gTLDs", says Li.

The Sunrise Period for .wang is between April 21 and May 21 when all trademark holders with Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) validation will be given priority to register their trademark-matching domain names.

Starting on May 26, .wang will have a five-week Landrush, followed by General Availability when all are welcome to register in the TLD.

About Zodiac Registry – Zodiac Holdings Limited and its affiliates were founded in 2008 in anticipation of the launch of the ICANN new gTLD program. Zodiac is the single largest new gTLD applicant with a total of 15 applications that are uniquely positioned to serve the Chinese speaking Internet users around the globe. Zodiac has a core team of domain industry veterans with its headquarters in Beijing. Visit Page

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